NOS4A2 by Joe Hill (William Morrow [imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2013)
Victoria “Vic” McQueen, “Brat” to her dad, finds things. Her mom loses a bracelet, her friend loses a toy, a neighbor loses a pet, and Vic hops on her Raleigh Tuff Burner bicycle, pedals herself into a near-trance until she reaches her bridge and her bridge always delivers her to what she wants to find. And when she wants to find trouble, well, her bridge leads her all the way to the “Sleigh House” and the kidnapper Charlie Manx, who has wheels of his own, a 1938 Rolls Royce Wraith, that can whisk him along unmapped roads, roads leading to the territory he has named Christmasland.
Going to Christmasland demands a certain price, a certain … fuel. And Charlie is more than a kidnapper, and much, much older than he looks. And he looks pretty old.
Vic survives her first encounter with Manx and meets the future father of her son in the process. But the toll of her encounter is high, depriving her of any sense of normality or serenity. She knows she’ll meet Manx again.
All of that barely scratches the surface of early events in NOS4A2. Joe Hill provides several well-realized characters, like Linda and Chris McQueen, Vic’s parents; Wayne, her son; Lou, Wayne’s father; and especially Bing Partridge, Manx’s henchman, and Maggie Leigh, another woman with a power who befriends Vic. Hill is Stephen King’s son and at least at the beginning of the novel he writes a lot like King at his best, setting up the basic situation quickly and efficiently, laying the foundation for what happens later in the novel. Hill’s writing has a forward momentum that makes it feel the book is reading itself and you’re just absorbing images and events. The last few hundred pages – the U. S. hardcover runs 689 pages – go by like bats outta Vic’s bridge.
Where Hill differs from his father, at least in this novel and Heart-Shaped Box, in not focusing on a community in a set location – this isn’t about a Derry or a ‘Salem’s Lot. Hill introduces and sketches in the widely-scattered characters he needs, the ones likely to be involved in such doings, so that we feel we know them and even care for some of them, and he then proceeds to tell his story briskly, but never so fast he can’t insert a grace note, as when a store full of customers aid Vic and Lou, one of the customers a young mother: “The blonde took quiet command of the room and everyone in it then, all without raising her voice or ever setting down her toddler. Later, when Vic thought about what she liked best in women, she always thought of the soldier’s wife, of her certainty and her quiet decency. She thought of mothering, which was really another word for being present and caring what happened to someone.”
That quote also represents a concern Hill shares with his father, the consideration and appreciation of family. Vic does not belong to the traditional nuclear family; her parents’ marriage is broken and not reparable, and when she has a family of her own her fears for her sanity and her doubts of her fitness to be a mother distances her from Lou and Wayne, even as those two stand at the center of her attention, even as she strives to be “present and caring.”
I’ve seen discussion on-line about the title and why allude to Nosferatu when you don’t feature the usual vampiric activity and, outside the lines quoted above, no ingestion of blood. It’s a fair question. Still, there are markers, like the description of Manx, which isn’t far from that of Max Schreck or Stephen King’s Barlow from Salem’s Lot. And Manx sleeps during the day. And he has a Renfield in Bing Partridge. And his Rolls Royce Wraith is rather like a metal coffin with wheels.
Okay, that last is stretching it some, and all of that is superficial or literary allusion. What really counts as vampirism is, first, the extraction of a child’s soul as fuel for the car to reach Christmasland. And second, a Tim-Powers-like price for power: When Vic uses her abilities, the brutality of the resulting headaches is in proportion to the duration of use and afterwards always feels somehow diminished; further, exercising her abilities costs Maggie Leigh her power of speech even as it withers her physically over time. And then there’s Manx, whose humanity was leeched away by using the symbol of his power, the Rolls Royce Wraith. The true Nosferatu here may be that car, or more likely, what it symbolizes, the exercise of power without regard to consequence. Vic, Maggie, even Charlie Manx have power, great power, and the use of it takes them step by step away from the people around them, distancing them from the lives of everyone else around them.
Does NOS4A2 maybe allude to the power of story-telling, and the cost over time of the extraction of detail from the writer’s experience and memory and emotion, the distancing from family to pursue a lonely art?
That’s a pretty fair question, too, and I wonder how Hill and his dad would respond. In the meantime, like Hobbit I can’t recommend this novel highly enough.
MORE JOE HILL
Heart-Shaped Box
MORE VAMPIRES:
I am Legend by Richard Matheson
Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice
The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers
Next: Joyland by Stephen King
Thanks for the mention, Randy.
I’m also going to mention Rob’s review of NOS4A2, who, if anything, rated it even more highly than me! http://www.sffworld.com/2013/08/nos4a2-by-joe-hill/